Tucson schools to take $465,000 from Arab charity with Muslim Brotherhood ties

Last week, the governing board of the Tucson Unified School District asked the school board to accept a $465,000 curriculum grant from the Qatar Foundation International, a global philanthropic organization with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of the terrorist group Hamas.

The grant money is intended to implement “innovative curricula and teaching materials to be used in any Arabic language classroom,” reports the Arizona Daily Independent.

Two Tucson schools, Safford K-8 Magnet School and Cholla High Magnet School, will be the recipients of the terror-infested cash, according to Tucson News Now.

About 100 students at Cholla High Magnet School are learning Arabic. At Safford K-8 Magnet School, 125 students are learning the language.

Last year’s grant for Arabic language from the Qatar Foundation was $55,000.

A handful of similar programs funded by the Qatar charity exist in other American cities. In 2012, for example, the nonprofit provided $250,000 for a three-year pilot project for Arabic language at P.S. 368 in Harlem, reports DNAinfo New York.

The Qatar Foundation International is the U.S.-based branch of the Qatar Foundation, a generous global philanthropic organization founded in 1995 by Qatar’s ruling emir, Sheikha Hind bint Hamad Al Thani.

Al Thani is also an influential architect of Middle East media mammoth Al Jazeera.

In 2012, the Qatar Foundation launched the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics in Qatar. The Center’s director is Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Sunni Muslim and the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Ramadan had been banned from the United States for several years because he allegedly contributed money to a terror-connected charity, reports The New York Times. However, in 2010 the Obama administration allowed him to apply for a visa so that he could speak on a panel at Cooper Union in Manhattan.

The Qatar Foundation is also closely associated with Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a strong and candid advocate of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian cleric has a popular program on Al-Jazeera television and supervises Islam Online, a popular internet site for all things Muslim.

The Anti-Defamation League has called al-Qaradawi a “theologian of terror.”

In his book Flight of the Intellectuals, liberal scholar Paul Berman notes that al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa sanctioning Palestinian suicide attacks two years after Sept. 11 (and another one sagely allowing female suicide bombers to reveal their hair especially for certain suicide missions).